Garcia Books

I highly recommend this book by Dr. Hogan! I have been utilizing this book in my corporation for the past 8 years. It has proven to be of incredible value. It has facilitated team building, as well as great productivity among our teams. It also has provided an important resource for resolving problems in our corporate culture. All of the 4 skills are very important. Although, I posted a chart of Skill # 3 in my office: and this pie chart with the various qualities has proven to be very helpful at any given moment. There have been times (just in passing) where our Vice President and our President walked into my office, and were looking for an idea on how to effectively approach our current challenges. This pie chart (for skill three) has always had at least one (or more) recommended behaviors that became the perfect remedy to our challenging situation. Cultural Competency is what makes one internationally valuable in the global markets. This book has strengthened Cultural Competency in my teams in many, many different ways. This book will help anyone who truly puts it into practice with a good spirit. One of the many values of this book is in putting it into practice (daily). I especially like Dr. Hogan's common sense, her realism, as well as how she illustrates the need to practice Cultural Competency. This is a practical book that is more than theory, it gives one the "HOW TO", when it comes to being culturally competent. Cultural Competency is a skill that can always be refined, and Dr. Hogan's book effectively cultivates this continuous refinement.

What I like about Hogan's four-skills model is the listing of actual culturally competent behaviors (and a self-test). The competency behaviors described in chapter 4 are the foundation for effective dialogue, conflict resolution, and problem-solving in culturally diverse settings.. Overall, a very empowering learning process! As an anthropologist and as an educator I have found Hogan's book to be holistic in its approach and pragmatic. I highly recommend this book!

Perhaps the author's intentions were in the right place but the final product is a confusing, pretentious mess. Written in such a way as to alienate almost everyone. Even one star is generous!!

This seems like a really nice attempt to approach training in cultural diversity, but it's not a stand-alone publication. It apparently needs another book, which I have not been able to locate, that gives background to the worksheets that this book offers. An example is the first workssheet which refers to a paragraph in which you are to count the number of occurances of the letter "f". No where in this workbook is that paragraph presented.

It seems that with its companion book this might be a valuable resource, as a stand-alone publication this is confusing at best.

This was a well written 2nd book to a 3 book series. Robyn is a satisfying character with depth and the plot leaves you wanting more. It is necessary to have the 3rd book waiting on your TBR pile, so immediate consumption is possible. Nicely done Mr.Robertson... Nicely done indeed.

As a time-travel romance, this is great fun. Historically, it's pretty good. But if I was in Robyn's situation, I'm not at all sure I could be strong enough NOT to check on my medieval boyfriend's future...

For someone born in mellow California in the twentieth century, Lady Robyn of Pontefract has reasonably adapted to living in the fifteenth century. She blames no one but herself for her present displacement as her white witch dabbling transported her to 1461 and the War of the Roses. To avoid blunders, she uses her palm pilot to help her keep score between the Lancasters and the Yorks though often she errs on whose side someone belongs.

Robyn has become engaged to Prince Edward, but problems exist for the duo. His family believes she is beneath him and wants their relationship to end. Meanwhile, aristocratic men want her killed as a witch, jailed for betting on the wrong side, or seek sex with her. Though a kind nurturing soul to all she meets, the noble female spouses want her dead. With reality intruding on history classes and romantic images, Robyn feels happy about her life, but would not mind returning to fast food California.

This is an engaging time travel romance that is clearly for fans of the series. New readers will feel more displaced than Robyn did when she first appeared in 1461. Robyn is a pragmatic and delightful lead protagonist and the rest of the ensemble either provides insight into her or the chaotic era. Fans of R. Garcia Y Robertson will enjoy the latest entry, as it is a fun tale.

Harriet Klausner

I won't go into the plot or story line! I picked this up at the library and was dismayed to see that it was part 2 of a trilogy. I don't usually like to start in the middle but figured what the heck.

I won't bother reading the rest of them.

His use of witchcraft as a device for the unity of women was interesting if not ignorant of knowledge of the time, and or course of witchcraft itself. The book is poorly researched in this area and it shows.

Had Robyn truly been transported into the middle ages she would never have evaded execution. Her open use of 20th century technology would have seen her burnt at the stake at first opportunity. People dealt with the unknown by through superstition. Her wristwatch, and even her coffee were enough to send her to her death, and unlike the book she would have found most people recoiling in fear from her.

This book didn't work for me. High humor, maybe, but when I read I like to be carried away by plausibility...to imagine that it just MIGHT could happen. All I found here were instance after instance to execute Robyn.

If you're interested in a plausible time travel book read the series by DIANA GABALDON, not only plausible but outstanding. In this genre she's the hands down champ.

The book was interesting from beginning to end, it was a real good mystery to solve and at the same time make you laugh while been intrigued on what will happen next in the case of the Miracle. I loved how Cuba, politics, religion and US came together in this one book since the story is not just well written but also well developed. I advise everyone to read it and if you are confuse at the end, go back and read the prologue, it might shed some light of why it ended that way.

I have read all three of Garcia-Aguileras other books, and liked them all. The only thing I liked about this book was visiting Miami and hearing from Lupe again. The story was just not believable. Many questions were left unanswered and I felt unfulfilled when I finished the book. For example, Lupe goes through the trouble to apply (and get accepted) to a retreat at the nunnery, and then she never goes, and it is not addressed again. Hmmmm? We never find out why the murderer feels the way he does about Cuba, or why the triplets are under his power. I would definely read the next Lupe Solano mystery because I think Garcia-Aguilera has great potential, but this book was not a winner.

I have read and enjoyed the previous books in this series, and this one is a big disappointment. Although Lupe remains an appealing character, the plotting is sloppy and there are too many unresolved questions.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book for its mystery and background. I am an Anglo, Catholic originally from Tampa. I'm old enough to have had childhood playmates whom we then called Cuban refugees, so it's interesting to see that some turned into Cuban-American princesses, like protagonist Lupe. (Not surprising, I guess, because most of the pre-Marielitos (spelling?), were professionals and business people, even if they came to the U.S. with nothing and had to start over.) However, none of this background is necessary for a reader to like Garcia-Aguilera's books. As a matter of fact, G-A explains it all in an engrossing way.

Regarding an earlier reviewer's criticism that Lupe never goes on her retreat ... Lupe does mention (on page 204) that the case may not necessitate her actual attendance.

I thought using triplets was contrived. It could just have easily been twin sisters and an older or younger brother. My own picayune comment is over use (twice on page 229) of the word "monogram" instead of "monograph" for the learned paper/booklet written by character Sister Mary about the Cuban Virgin. This was probably the publisher's error. Overall, a wonderful series of mysteries. I look forward to the next.

Aunque la novela entretiene un poco, no pude evitar estar completamente distraida por los errores en la novela. La novela es una traduccion del ingles. No se como se atrevieron a publicar el trabajo de este traductor. Parece que lo tradujeron a traves de estas paginas web que traducen bien literal. ¡Que horror!

I purchased this book because it was on the top ten most read books in Miami in the month of May and I thought it would be fun to read something light thematically speaking. No politics or historical details nothing of that nature but it was a struggle to get through this book without being tempted to stop reading it completely. The plot was very predictable and the development was too slow.

This book, I suppose is an attempt to give readers a glimpse of modern day Cuban-american culture. Margarita the protagonist of the book is a prominent lawyer as well as her husband Ariel. They have a son who is well-cared for by the in house maid and most of Margarita's day is spent with her two closest friends Vivian and Anabel doing anything and everything around Miami. Maragrita gets a suprise call from a former love interest Luthor and all hell breaks loose when she starts to see him secretly during her lunch hours at his apartment nearby work. As the story progresses, she becomes pregnant and doom lingers as to whether her husband or her lover is the father. However, we learn that the preganancy is a conspiracy between her very "Cuban" mother, her husband and the local pharmacist.

I believe the intent of the author was to make this an exciting read as the book is very contemporary with the setting in Miami. However, I just found it unchallenging, predictable and just boring. The last fifty pages of the book was interesting otherwise this was a boring read. I would say it is the reader's choice but if you have other books on your list to read, read them.

Margarita Maria Santos Sola is a successful young female attorney, specializing in immigration law. She is also a wife and mother, and is taking a year's leave of absence to be with her 3-year old son, Marti. Soon she will have to make a decision whether to go back to work, or be a full time housewife and mother. Margarita seems to spend most of her time idling about, chatting with her ditzy girlfriends, Vivian and Anabel, or attending social functions, yet we are told that she is normally a hard-driving, disciplined attorney.

Her relaxing summer changes dramatically when her old (WASP) boyfriend from law school shows up in Miami (where he is working on a case), and declares his love for her. What follows is, you can imagine, a very hot summer indeed. Now Margarita has some really hot decisions to make. Not only is the old boyfriend the most goodlooking man she has ever known, but he learned to speak Spanish fluently, just for her.

I won't belabor the plot. The story moves at a leisurely pace, with long digressions about Cuban-American culture and customs, family dynamics, spiritual advisors, and longing for Cuba. I picked up this book in hopes of improving my Spanish, and found it very useful for that, because the story moves so slowly and with much repetition of key words and phrases. As an actual novel, I must say, that it dragged a bit. I enjoyed it, though, and I'm glad I finished it. If you're looking for light summer reading you may like it as well. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Este libro me encanto en su totalidad, el estilo de escritura y las narrativas hacerca de las costumbres latinas en Miami es lo que mas disfrute. Carolina captivo exactamente la esencia de nuestra cultura sin escapar ni un detalle. Despues de haber leido ese libro, decidi leer todos los demas publicados por Carolina. Ahora estoy en espera de mas. Quisiera leer mas libros del estilo "Un verano caliente"

yerma is a book with a lot going for it from a literary point of view, but is difficult to read as a non-native speaker.

When reading Lorca's plays you have to remember that they are in fact Plays and are not meant to be read but to be preformed. They weren't created to specifically entertain but were supposed to be a photographic representation of life in rural spain during the 1930's. Yerma is a story about a woman pressured by societal expectations to have children. When she finds out that she can not conceive (Yerma in spanish literally means desert, she is barren) it drives her into depression. Its a story about the unrealistic pressures and expectations of society on women during her time. The beauty in Lorca's work is in his use of symbolism and repetition. Its not a play to read for pleasure but rather education.

Esa obra no es el mejor de Lorca. La Casa de Bernarda Alba es el mejor.

"Yerma," the play by Federico Garcia Lorca, has been adapted by Pam Gems in the version I read. Gems also wrote the introduction to the book, in which she praises Lorca as one of Spain's greatest artists of all time. A note before the beginning of the play notes that this adaptation was first presented in Manchester in 2003.

The title character of Yerma is a rural wife who is frustrated because she has not yet given birth to a child. The play follows her conflict with her husband and interactions with other characters. "Yerma" certainly raises some important issues: marriage, gender roles, motherhood, trust, and honor. And there is some wonderfully poetic language. But overall I found this play dull and uninteresting; moreover, the characters never really engaged me. For better examples of Gems' talent, I suggest the fine plays "Marlene" and "The Snow Palace."

She should fire her editor. Any idiot half knowledgeable in Wisconsin trivia that doesn't know to include General Billy Mitchell, Laura Ingalls or the proper names of the Indian tribes has no business writing or editing.

I never thought a trivia book could be so entertaining! Informative and clever, Conard makes learning about the state of Wisconsin fun!!

I've been a Wisconsin resident nearly all my life - (60 years) - traveled the state north to south and east to west and thought I knew alot about my state - not so!!! I found the book informative and very fun to read.

THE BLACK PANTHER TIE IN WAS ONE I CHOSE TO BUY BASED PURELY ON A LIST HERE.VERY GLAD I DID.NOT A CRUCIAL PART OF THE STORY BUT GOOD TO SEE A NON AMERICAN STYLE STORY, EVEN IF NAMOR BRINGS US THAT ANGLE EVERY TIME HE POPS UP.WHICH IS A LOT, THIS IS NO EXCEPTION.PANTHER & STORM GO AROUND TRYING TO BE NICE TO EVERYONE ,BUT WHAT FUN WOULD THAT BE FOR A COMIC.NEVER KNOWN ABOUT BLACK PANTHER MUCH,BEING FAIRLY NEW TO COMICS AND ALL,BUT THIS SERIES WAS ALL ABOUT LEARNING THE PEOPLE OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE.AND THAT I HAVE.HOPE NO-ONE IS OFFENDED BY MY BATMAN REFERENCE BUT COME ON.IF IT WAS DARK HOW WOULD A BAD GUY STEALING A WOMANS PURSE REALLY KNOW THE DIFFERENCE????ANYWAY,GREAT SUPRISE TIE IN FOR ITS STORY, ACTION AND THE ALL IMPORTANT POLITICAL SIDE WHICH IS REALLY WHAT THE WHOLE GIANT SERIES IS ABOUT.QUICK..TO THE PANTHER CAVE!!

While this tie-in to the "Civil War" event isn't entirely necessary to understand the main story, it's filled with scenes that expand upon the "Civil War" series and infuse it with some much-needed humanity in the form of the Black Panther and his wife Storm. Hudlin, the President of Entertainment for BET television, doesn't write wall-to-wall action, so his "Black Panther" series isn't everyone's cup of tea...it just happens to be mine.

I haven't been very impressed with Reginald Hudlin's relaunch of Black Panther thus far, and his Civil War tie-in doesn't so much either. Now that King T'Challa, AKA the Black Panther, has married Storm; the two embark on a planet wide (and even beyond) tour doing meet and greets with plenty of familiar faces. In America though, T'Challa sees the results of the superhuman Civil War that is ravaging both hero and villain alike, and has a talk with pro-registration leader Tony "Iron Man" Stark himself. Naturally Tony wants T'Challa on his side, but he finds it wiser to stay out of the struggle between Iron Man and Captain America as the Civil War rages to cataclysmic results. If you've read the main Civil War storyline by Mark Millar, then you no doubt already know what side Black Panther picks and what kind of impact he has on the events at hand. This Civil War tie-in really does nothing of the sort to expand much of anything, and Hudlin's story is honestly pretty boring. The artwork is pretty good throughout this TPB, but overall there isn't anything we haven't seen before, and there isn't anything really vital to the overall effect of the Civil War. All in all, Black Panther: Civil War may be worth a look for hardcore Black Panther fans or Civil War collectors who need every TPB tie-in, but this is better left on the shelf.

I shopped a long time to locate this publication. It is worth the cost and the wait. For anyone wishing for a glimpse of different cultural rituals of family, this is a must have for your collection.

Sure, the photographs look nice on big glossy oversized spreads... But I have to consider the message of the book, as loosely given in the text that introduces, accompanies, and then summarizes this collection of photos. Although the book will likely impress and inform readers about cultural diversity, unfortunately the text tries to claim how amazingly similar all these patterns are. It tries at every turn to introduce mystical elements and bases this whole approach on an interpretation of psychologist Carl Jung's conception of archetypes and the "collective unconscious." It is really too bad that the editor and commenters were so limited in their approach - tending toward the poetic rather than the analytic - for this book could have served as an introduction to the principles of cultural diffusion, history, culture areas, and other anthropological and sociological concepts and principles. Instead of looking at how the people of Madagascar had travelled from Southeast Asia, or (sometimes forceful) patterns in the spread of the "world religions" caused replacement or hybridization with traditional religions, or how the similarities in indiginous religions are rooted in the similar levels of technology and societal size/type (foragers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists, etc.); this book instead would suggest that similarities between its hand-picked photographs are supposed to show the existence of either God or a collective unconscious. It would have helped for the book to provide a clear definition of the "collective unconscious" that can actually fit in with modern understandings of cultural diffusion, memetics, social systems and cultural evolution. But it didn't; and so there was a large opportunity missed to reveal one of the truly remarkable cultural advances of modern times; that of rational and cumulative scientific endeavors. This book will instead only impress with the proneness of humanity to cling to the irrational. Instead of just a couple of quotes from Jung and Joseph Campbell, this book desperately needs quotations from Freud and Durkheim! Instead, this large tome addresses things at the same level as your average travelogue tv show. It whets the appetite and even feeds you a bit, but the "food" turns out to be candy rather than meat.

This book deals with "the big picture". I got a sense of viewing customs through time. The many cultures shown are contrasted in an exciting way. Stunning photographs showing rituals surrounding birth, death, marriage, etc. are accompanied by intelligent, inspiring copy. A beautiful and thought provoking book.

I received my book in a great condition, and as promised, it is an international edition.

A good book for introduction to the world of telecommunications and networks. Teaches the basics about networks, the OSI model and common protocols in use.

I am using this textbook for a Masters-level course in network communications.

This book covers each topic quite well, but I found it difficult to use for out-of-order reading. Particularly when using algebraic notation, the meanings of the variables are not defined in each and every example, meaning that you have to manually go back through the book to find out where in the book the values were first defined. For this reason, where mathematical formulas are involved (which is quite often), it's difficult to locate a topic and read up just on that topic without a lot of frustration. It would be much easier to use if the variable definitions were repeated in each example.

So, perhaps it is good for a cover-to-cover read for someone who is able to take in and understand information thoroughly on the first pass, but it's not good as a reference book or for people who follow a different method of learning.

This book is an embarrassment. The back cover blurb promises 'every Cuban film made' from 1897 to 2001, but this is far from the case. The author has no previous experience researching or writing about Cuban film, and it shows (why do people from other fields feel themselves qualified to write film books?). The Hispanic author's English is shaky at best, and the publisher, known for printing anything an author sends it, didn't have it copy-edited, despite the high price of the book. Some of the entries are simply long verbatim quotes from Cuban publicity material. Elsewhere he says such insightful things as "like Fellini on a bad day" and "you have to have a lot of patience to sit through this one". The author shows very little understanding of Cuban cinema or society and the entries are usually just plot summaries, leavened with the author's inane and meaningless opinions. The technical credits are less than minimal - year, length, cast, basically. A thorough disgrace that should never have been published. By the way, Ronald Schwartz, whose review appears above, has written equally mediocre books for the same publisher and is quoted glowingly throughout this one. The other review above, written by 'a customer', is a friend of Schwartz's, and perhaps of the author of the Cuban Filmography, and shills for Schwartz's embarassing books elsewhere on Amazon. Save your money.

This book includes everything. It is a great reference book. The author's critiques are very useful. The summaries don't ruin the endings, but do give the reader an overview of the movie.

More than an A to Z compilation of over 250+ films, Garcia-Osuna casts an intellectual's perception over every entry, examining each film for its cinematic and ideological values. A very valuable text for its perspicasity, the author sees Cuban film as part of the cultural fabric of the nation's political history, pre- and post-Castro. Gorgeously illustrated and the only one of its kind published by McFarland in English, I would recommend this book for all cinema buffs, library collections and especially to Hispanic readers who have very little knowledge of Cuban films from the turn of the century to the present.
Dr.Ronald Schwartz, Prof.of Film, Department of English
Columbia University